Modern Legacy: The Thinking Machine Scourge

Let’s revisit the banned list. On the top of that list is the five artifact lands. Does that mean Affinity as a deck is dead? I think not. I believe that the deck is very viable if you take an objective look at what exactly makes it tick.

In regular Affinity decks, the five artifact lands are a very valuable part of the deck. It guarantees the ability to achieve a great number of artifacts on the battlefield, with minimal effort. In modern, we do not have that luxury, so we have to reexamine components of the deck, see what we cannot support anymore.

First up is the classic Affinity spells- Frogmite, Myr Enforcer, and Thoughtcast. Frogmite and Myr Enforcer both act as pesudo-free creatures, while Thoughtcast is the means by which you reload your hand. With the decreased artifact count the deck will have, we have to take a close look at the time by which we can cast these spells. Frogmite usually costs 1 mana or zero on the second turn, which is very acceptable in this deck. Myr Enforcer keeps on costing three mana on turn two, and 1 or 2 on turn three, which makes it slightly clunky. A third turn vanilla 4/4 always gets trumped by a Tarmogoyf. For Thoughtcast, we have to look at the role it fulfills. It is often cast as the last spell in your hand, and is used to refill your hand. This makes it a valuable tool for this deck.

Next up is the nonartifact spells. Affinity decks tend to run either Disciple of the Vault, or Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas. I believe with the lack of artifact lands, the Disciple cannot pack enough of a punch to be truly effective. The issue with Tezzeret that I have is the whole deck’s mana cost averages out at around 1.5 mana, with the highest costing card being three. Tezzeret’s 4 mana cost is a stress on the deck that I do not want it to have.

I would like to have 18 lands, and the 6 extra mana sources to have a total of 24. This means we need to fill out the lands with 14 more cards. What we can do is to add both Nexuses (Blinkmoth and Inkmoth). This inflates our artifact count, while still being threats. Bonus. 6 more lands left. I would prefer these to be colored lands, so now we look at what we have in the deck. 7 cards requiring blue mana to cast is present. Do we need any other colored cards? I personally do not think so, so Islands it is.

This deck can explode out of the gates very quickly. I believe that this deck is positioned very well in the metagame, because it is able to race most combo decks, and becomes better after sideboarding, while being able to overpower an normal control deck that aims to beat combo. Heavily aggresive decks such as Zoo will give this deck problems, but since Zoo loses to combo and certain styles of control (12post), Zoo’s presence shouldn’t be prevalent in the early stages of the meta.